Tamarack Township snow-depth marker replaced after thirty-one winters

TAMARACK TOWNSHIP — The wooden snow-depth marker that has stood beside the Tamarack Township garage since January 1994 was removed Monday morning and replaced with a new fiberglass pole, ending a run of thirty-one winters and what township supervisor Gene Hollenbeck called "the most reliable piece of equipment we own."

The original marker, a ten-foot pine post painted white with black graduations every six inches, was installed by former highway superintendent Dale Wickersham during the winter of the Blizzard of '94. It became a fixture in township operations and, unofficially, in local weather reporting.

"We checked it every morning," Hollenbeck said Tuesday. "You could see it from the road, so folks would slow down just to read it. Seventeen inches, twenty-two inches. It was the only measurement that mattered."

Retirement and replacement

The marker was removed after highway crews noticed the base had begun to rot below the frost line. A replacement pole, made of hollow fiberglass with factory-printed measurements, was installed in the same location and will be painted to match the original's markings.

The old post will be donated to the Tamarack Township Historical Society, which plans to display it indoors. Society president Arlene Kopp said the marker will likely be mounted horizontally in the archive room, though she acknowledged "it won't look right lying down."

Record measurement

The marker's highest recorded reading came during the lake-effect event of February 2007, when it registered forty-eight inches of accumulation over a seventy-two-hour period. That storm also delayed a county board meeting by four days, though the culvert vote in question was tabled anyway.

Hollenbeck said the new pole is rated for winds up to sixty miles per hour and is guaranteed for fifteen years, though he doubts it will last as long as Wickersham's original.

"Dale used treated lumber and set it in a coffee can full of concrete," he said. "You can't improve on that."

The first measurable snow of the season has not yet fallen in Tamarack Township. The new marker currently reads zero inches.

I stood next to the old post for about ten minutes on Tuesday trying to think of something profound to say about it, but all I could come up with was that it looked like a post. Sometimes a thing just does its job for thirty-one years and that's enough.